Unveiling the Veil: Gendered Discourses and the (In)Visibility of the Female Body in France

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Notes

1 The cases of women’s re-veiling in Egypt and veiled Turkish women in Germany demonstrate “the historical dynamism of the veil and the ways in which it is both an overdetermined signifier against which individual women must negotiate their own identities in relation to a complex of different meaning and the possibilities which the reworking of the veil can have for forging new political, religious or symbolic identities.” (Dwyer 4)

2 Charles Pasqua, the Gaullist minister of the interior who designed the reform to the code nationality, expressed similar feelings towards the incipient European political integration: “In France, the right to vote is inseparable from citizenship and this from nationality. There are 5 million foreigners here, 1.5 million of them communitarians. Our communitarian guests are welcome, but we are not willing to share our national sovereignty with them. France is an exceptional people and not an amalgam of tribes” (qtd. in Stolcke 10).